Field
The present disclosure relates to network management. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method and system for dynamically selecting and configuring links of a virtual link aggregation group in a distributed architecture.
Related Art
The exponential growth of the Internet has made it a popular delivery medium for multimedia applications, such as video on demand and television. Such applications have brought with them an increasing demand for bandwidth. As a result, equipment vendors race to build larger and faster switches with versatile capabilities, such as service insertion and provisioning, to move more traffic efficiently. However, the size of a switch cannot grow infinitely. It is limited by physical space, power consumption, and design complexity, to name a few factors. Furthermore, switches with higher capability are usually more complex and expensive. More importantly, because an overly large and complex system often does not provide economy of scale, simply increasing the size and capability of a switch may prove economically unviable due to the increased per-port cost.
A flexible way to improve the scalability of a switch system is to build a fabric switch. A fabric switch is a collection of individual member switches. These member switches form a single, logical switch that can have an arbitrary number of ports and an arbitrary topology. As demands grow, customers can adopt a “pay as you grow” approach to scale up the capacity of the fabric switch.
Meanwhile, layer-2 (e.g., Ethernet) switching technologies continue to evolve. More routing-like functionalities, which have traditionally been the characteristics of layer-3 (e.g., Internet Protocol or IP) networks, are migrating into layer-2.
As Internet traffic is becoming more diverse, virtual computing in a network is becoming progressively more important as a value proposition for network architects. For example, link aggregation involves the bundling of one or more physical ports to present a single interface to a client, thereby increasing bandwidth and providing redundancy. While protocols exist to facilitate link aggregation between two individual network elements, some issues remain unsolved when using link aggregation in a distributed architecture. Particularly, when an individual network element is coupled to multiple individual member switches of a fabric switch, existing technologies do not provide a scalable and flexible solution for establishing and controlling active and standby links of a virtual link aggregation group associated with the multiple individual member switches.